On Wed, Mar 28, 2007 at 11:50:07AM EST, Dave Workshop wrote:
> On Wed, 2007-28-03 at 06:45 +0100, Liam O'Toole wrote:
[..]
> > Run the following commands:
> >
> > fc-cache -fv
> > fc-list
> >
> > The output of the first command should include the
> > directory /usr/share/fonts/truetype/msttcorefonts/, and the second
> > should include the new fonts. At that point the fonts will be available
> > to GTK2 applications such as Abiword.
> > Liam

Dave replied:

> But, alas, I still don't see any true-type fonts available in Gnome or
> its applications. I looked in the desktop configuration, Abiword, and
> Gnumeric for the new fonts. I also tried to log out and in again to
> Debian both as root and as a normal user, but no success.
>
> Any additional suggestions??

CGA replied:

I had a heck of a time having the Terminus (fixed) font recognized by
mozilla -- another GTK app. I had done as Liam rightly recommends
above and mozilla was ignoring my favorite fixed font.
Does gnome/gtk keep stuff in ram across login sessions to initialize
more quickly ..?
So, unless it's really inconvenient at this point I would just reboot
the boxx just in case .. see if it helps.
Otherwise, I don't use gnome or any of the apps you mention .. but are
they recent versions .. Just thinking that since it's a sarge system
you're talking about, some of the apps might be too ancient to be
fontconfig-aware..?
HTH
Thanks,
cga

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Thanks, all for the suggestions.
I checked my apps running under Gnome, and at least some of the
truetype fonts have become available (those from:
/usr/share/fonts/truetype/msttcorefonts/ but not from
/usr/share/fonts/truetype/ttf-bitstream-vera), but I can't say what
exactly led them the become available.
I tried dpkg-reconfigure fontconfig as suggested by
Rage, and also
fc-cache -fv as suggested by Liam
Some confusion arose (a continual state for me since I am new to Linux
- there are surprises almost everywhere - most of the type.....now why
did THAT happen???), since the fonts are NOT shown explicitly as
truetype fonts in the font selection dialogue of the applications -
they are only identified by name, so you must know somehow by name
that they are in fact truetype.
One rather nice feature of the Gnome desktop (V 2.8 ) is that all
available fonts can be sampled in a very nice manner. Follow below:
Applications>Desktop Preferences>Font
Choose the Help button on the lower left corner to open the font Help
page. Scroll down to the bottom of Help (Section 11.6.2) for an
explanation how to use the file manager/browser to examine installed
fonts.
Open the Gnome file manager/browser and clear the location field (the
one that points to various file locations). Type in fonts:///
and there, in blazing glory, are all the available
fonts.
The specific location of the each font in the file system is not
shown, and I have not been able to determine why some have a "lock"
symbol on them, but there they are. Neat!
Font management in Debian Sarge is still a complete mystery to me,
with various command line commands doing whatever (and exactly what
does the gui tool Defontmgr do, anyway???), but maybe in Etch and
updated Gnome the situation has been improved. I'll wait until Etch
becomes the stable Debian release to find out.
Meanwhile, Gnome is proving to be a productive and pleasant GUI for my
purposes. My thanks to the development team.
Dave W.